<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>guilt is a useless feeling by eyes_like_a_miracle</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27898513">guilt is a useless feeling</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyes_like_a_miracle/pseuds/eyes_like_a_miracle'>eyes_like_a_miracle</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Soulbound - Fate's Hand (Web Series)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Character Study, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Moving On, Panic Attacks, also if im missing a last name please lmk so i can fix the tags!, anyway i love flint and i have Emotions so here's this, has it been beta read? also no, is it coherent? no, it is not very long but it is more than i have written in several years, ive said it before and i'll say it again: i will be this entire goddamn fandom if i have to, most of those characters are just mentioned but i need.... tags lmao, mostly hurt but a little bit of comfort, no beta reader we die like men, sorta - Freeform, tbh yall this was me looking at these characters and immediately having feelings, this is all introspection lmao, uhh</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 09:36:06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,942</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27898513</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyes_like_a_miracle/pseuds/eyes_like_a_miracle</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a Flint character study; set immediately after episode 33.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>guilt is a useless feeling</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The click of the door closing behind Flint felt like a broken promise. He was so tired of feeling like this. Guilt sat heavy on his chest, gnawing at his ribs and his spine like some sort of feral animal. Anger, mostly directed at himself, only ever made things worse but persisted anyway because the other option was to be sad all the damn time and at least anger had the potential, no matter how small, to be a productive emotion. And then of course there was the endless abject terror that he’d get someone else hurt – get someone else <em>killed. </em>Leaning his back against the door, Flint closed his eyes and tried to ignore the tears rolling one after another down his cheeks. For just a moment last night, Flint had thought that maybe he’d finally started to shake all those awful thoughts that had hung so heavily around his neck along with Lyre’s ring and Lyre’s ghost since her death, and he’d been momentarily proud of himself for finally taking steps to move on. He hadn’t even been able to handle the thought of letting himself move forward from Lyre a few months ago, and there he’d been, on a date. A date with a pirate that had taken Flint and his friends hostage and almost gotten them killed, sure, but also a pirate who had turned around and saved Kali’s life not much later. But then he’d come back to the guild this morning and Ronja and Kali had been so worried, then so <em>upset </em>when they’d found out he’d spent the night with Riptide, and Kalius had sounded so damn disappointed, and all semblance of good feeling had been thrown right out the window. He understood their reactions, he really did, but that didn’t mean the shock on Ronja’s face or the betrayal in Kali’s eyes hadn’t hurt just as badly as any stab wound.</p><p>Flint locked the door with one trembling hand and went to clutch at the ring strung around his neck with the other. It was a small comfort, but Flint would take even a faint memory of genuine happiness at this point over the mind-numbing, confused terror he could feel clawing its way into his brainstem. When his fingers closed around empty air, there was a moment of blind panic that burned all the breath from his lungs before he remembered that he’d taken it off before he’d gone to see Riptide. Trying and failing spectacularly to keep his pulse steady, Flint pushed the pillows off his bed and to the floor in his rush to get to the ring. What had he been thinking, leaving it behind like that? What if it had gotten lost, or worse, stolen? Even the thought had panic rising like bile in the back of Flint’s throat. The ring was cold when Flint finally managed to wrangle his shaking fingers into curling around it, and the sharp bite of the band against his palm felt like forgiveness and judgment in equal measure. It did not make it any easier to breathe.</p><p>Flint sat heavily on the bed, curling forward around the ring as he held it, still clutched in desperate fists, to his chest. Maybe if he pressed hard enough, it would merge with his ribcage and he’d never be able to abandon it so carelessly ever again. Distantly, Flint was aware that his breathing was far shorter and shallower than it should have been, a situation that was not helped by the fact that he was also crying hard enough that all he could taste was salt, but he didn’t really have the control over his body at the moment to fix it. It would fix itself eventually, anyway. Flint was more focused on the fact that he could almost feel Lyre’s hands like a memory of a nightmare – curled over his shoulders, the tips of her nails pressed just this side of painfully into the skin above his collar bones; threaded through his own fingers where the cord he’d strung the ring on made space; wrapped around his neck where that cord should’ve been. Everything had gone dim and fuzzy, like a heavy blanket of wool and static had been laid out between Flint and the rest of the world. The only thing that felt real was the cold metal of Lyre’s ring clasped in his clammy hands, and the distantly painful way the edges of it dug into his skin when he held onto it even tighter in a desperate attempt to stay at least partially anchored to reality. It was an old habit, one borne of paranoia, but Flint would never be able to forgive himself if the paranoid part of his brain turned out to be right for once and he ended up caught off guard and useless if something did happen and he needed to help. Not that Flint was exactly an expert in forgiving himself for things to begin with, but he thought he was learning. He was certainly trying to, anyway.</p><p>It was impossible for Flint to tell how long he spent like that, sitting on the edge of the bed curled around the ring and fighting with his muscles to try and remember how breathing worked. He tried not to think about Lyre, because his memories of her were as much of a curse as they were a comfort, but inevitably his scattered thoughts ended up circling back to Kali or Riptide or Ronja or Rain and then eventually back to Lyre and Flint’s heartbeat picked back up another two notches and he had to take the time to force it back towards some semblance of normalcy. By the time he managed to drag his body back into a half-hearted pretense of cooperating with his brain, Flint was exhausted and annoyed at the entire situation. It was barely noon, if the too-bright sunlight filtering in through the window was any indication, but Flint was fully ready to go back to bed at that point. He didn’t think he’d ever live it down if Ronja caught him sleeping in the middle of the day, though; he could already hear the half-barbed comments about Riptide keeping him up. Not that she would be entirely wrong, but some things she just didn’t need to say.</p><p>He let himself fall to the side, exhaling slowly as he tried to get the muscles in his shoulders to unclench. His back hurt from sitting curled up like that for so long, his head was already starting to pound, and his eyes felt swollen from the tears that were drying on his cheeks and making them feel tight and tacky. All in all, Flint felt like shit, which wasn’t unusual for a breakdown like this, but he still fucking hated it. Realizing he still had a death grip on the ring, and now much more aware of how badly it was hurting him to hold on to it that tightly, Flint uncurled his fingers and grimaced at both the creaky stiffness in them and the deep indents the ring had left in his palm. They were already bruising – he could tell because they were throbbing in time with his slowly decelerating heartbeat. It wasn’t necessarily painful, but it wasn’t a very pleasant sensation, so he flexed his hand a couple times in an attempt to soothe it. It didn’t work very well. </p><p>With a quiet sigh, Flint tentatively let himself think about the situation. Now that he was calmer, at the very least he could contemplate it without sending himself into another spiral of self-worth issues and survivor’s guilt. He’d already broken down over it, so now that that was out of the way and he was emotionally wrung out from it, as well as the fact that he wasn’t keyed up from the anxiety of wondering how Kali and Ronja would reach anymore, meant that he would be able to pick the whole mess apart from a more rational perspective. He’d known going into this that his friends wouldn’t like it. And he understood why, and he hadn’t been about to ask his friends to just get over it, because Kali had almost been killed and Ronja had lost a hand during their stay on Riptide’s ship. It had been a lot, and there was no way Flint could have justified asking them to trust Riptide. But he hadn’t – he hadn’t even told them about it, because he hadn’t wanted to deal with the inevitability of feeling like he’d been betraying the other two by accepting Riptide’s invitation. Kali had tried to be respectful, at least, but Flint almost would have preferred outright anger, or even incredulous disbelief like Ronja’s. Kali’s disappointment had been a quiet thing, like the split second where all the sound was sucked out of the air just before cannons went off, and now all Flint could do was cover his ears and wait for the explosion. It didn’t really help that Kali was already stressed – he’d been acting weird ever since Noir had shown up, and if Flint was being honest, it was starting to get more than a little worrying. He wasn’t about to pry, though; Flint was sure Kalius would say something when he was ready to talk about it or when it became relevant to the wellbeing of the rest of the party, whichever one happened first. Still, the fact that Kali’s reaction had seemed so stunted – especially after he’d been so aggressive toward Riptide, even after he’d saved his life – made Flint nervous. At least, he tried to convince himself, they’d seemed less upset about his giving a potential relationship a tentative try and more upset that said relationship was with <em>Roylin Riptide, </em>of all people.</p><p>Flint couldn’t say the same for himself. He took a moment to wipe at his eyes before he went back to tracing the long-memorized facets of the ring with the pad of his thumb. He honestly didn’t know how he felt about this whole thing. On one hand, the logical part of him knew that he couldn’t keep grieving over Lyre for forever, and he couldn’t use his grief as an excuse to isolate himself from everyone who found him attractive, no matter how odd the idea of that still was to him. It had barely been believable when Lyre had wanted to date him, and after everything it was hard to imagine that anyone else would, or that it would end in anything but disaster if they did. But Riptide had said in no uncertain terms that he found Flint attractive, and his Riptide had pretty thoroughly proven that he wasn’t lying, at least in that respect. And, to be fair, Flint couldn’t have denied that the feeling was mutual if he’d wanted to. A part of him – the part that had found the strength and courage to leave Lyre’s ring under a pillow the night before – recognized this as a good thing. If he was going to test the waters of potentially dating again with anyone, Riptide was a damn near perfect candidate, he was pretty, he didn’t seem like the type to pry or expect any sort of immediate trust, and it would be easy to cut ties with him if things went south or if Riptide proved to be a threat to any of Flint’s friends. Plus, if Riptide had any information on how to identify and/or break Rain’s curse, then there were very few lengths Flint was unwilling to go to if it meant helping her.</p><p>On the other hand, the idea of moving on from Lyre still felt huge and terrifying in a way Flint didn’t fully understand. Flint knew he was still in love with her, and he also knew that he would probably never <em>stop </em>loving her no matter how long he lived without her. Lyre had been a part of him even before they’d been romantically involved, just like Cypher had been and just like Kali and Ronja were now. To some extent, both Cypher and Lyre were still ingrained in some deep part of Flint’s psyche, even though they were both dead. Lyre’s memory was far stronger and more omnipresent than Cypher’s, though, but Flint thought that probably made sense. He’d been in love with Lyre, after all. The downside of that, though, was that Flint’s memories of Lyre were also riddled with long-festering guilt, and that was what made dealing with Riptide so confusing, even putting aside the fact that Flint and Riptide were very fundamentally different people. Part of Flint felt like even entertaining the idea of Riptide was betraying Lyre, even though she was long dead and Flint was fairly sure that he couldn’t ‘betray’ anything but her memory anymore. And, quite frankly, it was a stupid thought anyway, and Flint knew it. But it still lived in a dark corner of his mind, fed by memories of her smile and how much it had hurt to come back from that mission to find her dead and gone, buried while he’d been away. It didn’t help that his friends’ reactions this morning had been so decidedly negative, either. Everyone had loved Lyre, and as a result the absolute worst reaction she and Flint had gotten to the announcement of their relationship had been complete neutrality. And while Flint completely understood where Kali and Ronja were coming from with this – he didn’t entirely trust Riptide himself – and technically there had never been any sort of capital-S Something established between himself and Riptide, his confrontation with his friends had left Flint doubting his own choices. After all, he’d trusted Cypher almost as much as he’d trusted Lyre, and look where that had gotten them all.</p><p>Flint groaned at himself – he was just thinking himself in circles at this point, which was always frustrating – and propped himself up just long enough to tie the cord back around his neck before flopping back down onto the mattress to lay on his back. At least the familiar weight of the ring against his chest was something of a comfort, even if it did feel a bit like an ever-tightening collar sometimes. As he stared blankly at the ceiling, Flint reached up to rub his thumb idly over the scar on his lower lip. <em>This scar will only heal if you move on and love again, </em>the scar reader had said. He’d been right about everything else – although Flint wasn’t sure he would’ve described any of his scars as ‘loving,’ personally – so he was having a hard time just outright dismissing what the old man had said as nonsense or lies, but Flint still wasn’t sure how much stock he was willing to put in that advice. But she would want him to move on with his life and be happy, right? Wasn’t that what everyone always said? Or would she have agreed with that cynical part of Flint’s brain that said he needed to remain loyal to her in all aspects of life regardless of circumstance or consequence? Would she be angry with him for trying to move on? Or would she be disappointed like Kali had been, because it had been <em>Riptide </em>and they both thought Flint could do better? Flint felt mildly nauseous. He’d always hated upsetting her.</p><p><em>Fuck, </em>Flint thought, scrubbing his hands over his face with another frustrated sound. This was all so damn confusing, and thinking about it felt awful, and he was tired of it. He just wanted to be happy and functioning like a normal goddamn person for once. He shuffled around so that he was lying on the bed properly instead of being collapsed sideways on it and decided that taking a nap was, at this point, perfectly justified. Maybe if he was lucky, he would wake up and all of this would have magically resolved itself. Stranger things had happened in far more normal places than a tree growing out of a turtle dragon’s shell, Flint was sure. He tugged the tie out of his hair and tossed it to the floor where his pillows still were, only even bothering with that much because he already had a headache and knew that sleeping with his hair up would only make it worse. After the day he had already had, Flint didn’t particularly feel like waking up in more pain than he was already in. He spared a brief thought for the locked door, wondering even as his eyes slipped shut if he should get up and unlock it. <em>Nah, </em>he decided. If he was tired enough that he wasn’t even bothering with getting underneath a blanket or picking a pillow up off the floor, then he didn’t think he cared about the door. Besides, Kali and Ronja both had keys to the room if they absolutely needed to get in, and they were really the only people Flint fully trusted to be in the room while he was asleep anyway, so it didn’t really matter.</p><p>That was the last coherent thought he had before his exhaustion, both mental and physical, caught up to him and dragged him into blissful unconsciousness. By some small cosmic mercy, he managed to sleep peacefully, not to mention soundly enough that he didn’t wake even when Kalius and Kerziah bought Fernando in to nap and he chose to curl up next to Flint, or when Kali draped a blanket from his own bed over the both of them. For once, Flint had been afforded a brief moment of peace, and no one was willing to disrupt it.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>